


Memory of Blood and Earth

by AwesomePossum



Category: Magic: The Gathering (Card Game)
Genre: Ancient Ravnica, Gen, Gruul Clans, Mythology - Freeform, Original Guildpact
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-09
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:21:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26904295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AwesomePossum/pseuds/AwesomePossum
Summary: The Gruul are a tattered people--but they are only remnants, the fossil of what was once a great culture. Even their eldest know only the smallest sliver of their history. But their god, the Great Boar Ilharg, carries the past with him, and remembers all the way back to the beginning...
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3





	Memory of Blood and Earth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gamb](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gamb/gifts).



In the beginning, there were the people. They hunted, and slept, and walked the land as the other beasts did. But unlike other beasts, they knew of themselves. They did not want to be alone in the night, hunting in the cold forests far from home. They did not want to be alone when they faced the great bears and lions of the cold stone wastes, armed with spears of bone and stone. They did not want to be alone when they died. 

And so they were not. Called by their need, He came into being to witness and stand watch. He was present with them, and they were not alone. The first prayer was answered.

He existed in the minds of the people, in their senses, in their dreams.

The people grew more in themselves, unfurling. They saw that the world could give and take. When they had boons, they wished to be thankful and have a name for their fortune. When they had loss, they wished to know where the misfortune had come from, and where what was lost had gone when it was taken from them. When the great wildfires swept across the land, driving prey to them in endless meat on the hoof, they wished to know what hand had set it. When the floodwaters rose and surged and swept away their family members, they wished to know the name of the waters that had taken them, where they had gone. They prayed to know the source.

And so He was. He became Ilharg, wellspring of fire and flood, giver of feast and famine. 

They spoke of Him, whispered His name to the wind, and He lived in their songs.

The people felt small against the world they faced. Though their hearts were great, they had only the strength of their bodies and cleverness of their hands to keep them alive in a world of dangers. They longed for strength to protect themselves, something that could keep them and those they loved safe. 

A man named Ogun was hunting alone among the darkened forests and the stony vales. As he wandered the empty lands, he heard the sound of hunters all around him. Suddenly the trees were alive with dark shapes clad in fur and hunger and shadow. Direwolves raced down at him, and he raced away with the pack on his heels. Every beat of his heart sent the prayer through his body:  _ help me. Give me the means to protect myself. Let me find strength to face them.  _ Fear rose inside Ogun as the pack closed in.  _ If I die, let me find strength to die well.  _ He fled through the bracken and fens, but his feet caught on the wet, uneven ground, and he stumbled into the lair of a wild boar. Roused by the sound, the boar surged out of its hollow in rage. He saw before him not the man at his feet, but the wolves that crouched in the trees, who had dared invade his territory. The creature’s eyes became red with fire at this affront, and he lept over Ogun’s form to tear into the hunting pack. The spirit of fire surged in Ogun’s heart, and he leapt to his feet with his spear in hand, joining the fight. He and the boar fought together as one. They slew many of the wolves, and drove away those who survived. Bleeding into the earth of his wounds, the boar died with a wolf still impaled on his tusks. As his life ended, Ogun stood over him, and witnessed. Ogun lived, and returned to his people. He became the first prophet, and with his story he gave to Ilharg a new form and a new purpose.

Ilharg the protector, shield against the dark, whose strength drives the dangers back.

His image was painted on cave walls in red ochre and charcoal, and His stories lived.

The people traveled, and now He traveled with them as the Great Boar. They saw the endless strength and ferocity of the boars, saw that He lived in them, in their bodies and spirits. Soon, they thought to eat the meat of boars to take Him into themselves. They would consume the flesh of boars before a hunt or war, asking Ilharg’s blessings for taking His sacred essence out of the world and into themselves, to make them strong. And they did grow strong, and their belief grew stronger still. In time, He came into them until He was not only a being they encountered, but came to be part of them. He was the fire inside of their chests when they did battle, the life within the women when their bellies grew heavy with child, the muzzle that reached into the chests of the dying and drew out their final breath to carry it away where the living could not go.

He was with them, in the heart of them.

They carved His mark into tree and stone, that the world would remember that He, they, had been here.

They ranged far and wide, spreading across the land, flourishing. Families became tribes, tribes became clans. They grew, and they learned, and passed that learning through generations until learning became wisdom. They made traps and nets, became clever in their hunting. They learned to furrow the earth and come back to collect the filling roots and soft fruit, to bury the entrails of their hunts in the ground and let the old life feed the new. They learned to spin thread from the hair of beasts and ropes from reed and vine, to fashion water jugs out of gourds and cook pots from casting river mud. They learned to melt iron in great fires kept in pits of stone, and form it. They learned to shape the world. 

As they learned and grew, they shaped Him as well. Now He had their complexities rolled inside of Him, their power and purpose. No longer was He a simple invocation of protection or the bringer of fire and flood. He was birth, and death and most of all, all the life between. They sang songs in His name, sagas of His journeys. They told of the young Zarna, daughter of shamans who rode on His back to the ice mountain at the tip of the world to free the sun from winter. They told of the  _ korgen_, great giants made of the bones of the cursed dead who threatened to overrun the world, and how He gouged furrows into the flesh of the earth all the way down to it’s molten blood and drove the  _ korgen _ into the flames to be forever sealed in the stones beneath the world. They told of Ethe, the laughter of the wind, who sang her song to calm His rage in return for His guardianship, and how the lamium flowers grew wherever He dreamed to the sound of her voice. They told of Agri, the first and wisest of the witches, who seduced Him in the shape of a sow and bore from Him Kolrok, the second prophet and the first chieftain. 

They had taken His name now: Kalar Gruul, the People of the Boar. They prospered with the seasons, breathed the wind, travelled under the sun. Their towns were like trees anchored into the earth, their roads the roots tangled across the land. His stories were cast in the bronze plaques they wore across their chests, etched into the center poles of their longhouses, woven into the tapestries of the chiefs and carved into the bones and turtle shells of their seers.

The winds shifted, strange winds bringing holes in the world where outsiders came from beyond the Oceans of the Sky. He smelled power on them, the power of different lands--a threat to be guarded against, but only approached with caution. For a time, He withdrew his people into the wilds. Shrouded in wilderness and safe in its power, He watched these outsiders as they laid claim to His world. They brought change, creating massive structures and edifice to suit them, bending life to their will. They pillaged the world, ripping the bones from the earth, tearing the growing things from the land, sweeping creatures great and small into the maw of their holdings in countless slaughter. They brought violence in mass spectacle, forcing others to fight as a monument to their own glory. They grew like a blight, taking, ravening, leaving hard edges and cold constructs in their wake as they dared further into the wild lands. In time they turned to Ilharg’s people, taking them from the wilds as servants and slaves and meat. 

This could not be abided. 

Omnipotent in his rage, Ilharg rose up to defend the Kalar Gruul. Fire poured from beneath His hooves and scoured the enemy holdings. His tusks opened the earth to swallow their towers and machines. His war cry shook the air and broke their magics, and His thunderous charge ground their bodies into the rubble of their once-towering monuments. As He rose up, the wilderness rose with Him, root and branch and tooth and claw joining into a flood against the invaders. His people joined by His side--they were proud and their faith was strong. When they fell, their spirits fought on with Ilharg, carried in His wake. The spirits of the honored dead rose again, an infinite horde of the Kalar Gruul back to the beginning, to the time before names, to the very first of the people who had willed Him into existence from nothing. The people had made Him, and He had made them. They rode into the great war against the invaders as one. 

And the world trembled.

Seeing their ferocity and courage, other captives joined the fight. The great dragons filled the skies with fire and darkness. The demon with his horned crown laid waste to scores of the enemy warriors. The green lady summoned trees to walk the land, tearing stone from stone in their strongholds. The great sphinx bound their minds and sealed their magics. The angels descended on them like flocks of stormcrows, and summoned beasts surged forward to their masters’ call. Through it all rang the swords and blows and shouts of the Kalar Gruul. The conquerors looked out at the world they had claimed, watched as it pulled down their works to blade and tusk and fire and magic. Routed, they sought to flee, but found themselves bound to the fate of the holdings they had seized and dared call their own. It was there, surrounded by those who had thrown off their chains, that they found themselves standing before Ilharg. Facing the wrath of the god they had challenged, they asked for mercy they had never shown. 

To their arrogance and cruelty, the Great Boar granted them His answer.

In the aftermath of the war, alliances formed in battle were now forced to find a shape for peacetime. The sphinx proposed a compact, an accord between the great powers and their adherents to share the world among them. It was decided that the ruins of the invaders' massive cities would be rebuilt. Ilharg prickled at this, wanting to see their blight burned away, but the other powers entreated him. They needed to provide a home, they said, for all those who had been carried to the world from across the Oceans of the Sky, and for all those who had been taken into the usurpers’ constructed world and knew no other way to live. 

He was lord of the wilderness, they said, and it was as vast and deep as He was, as it had always been. What need had He to concern himself with a few holdings?

In the end, Ilharg allowed them to keep their cities. So long as the Kalar Gruul had the wooded hills and the tossing plains and the broad rivers wandering to the sea, it seemed to matter little, as the others had said. He returned to the wild lands with His people. They sang His name, and told His stories, and danced around the victory fires in their shared honor. And for a time, things returned to their natural rhythms. Satisfied that all was once more as it had been and tired from His labors in battle, the Great Boar slept. 

While he slept, He dreamed dark dreams. Dreams that although He had slain the enemy, watched their blood return to the soil, their hard-edged constructs and gleaming edifice continued to sprawl outward, eating further and further into the wilds like a lesion rotting away on a sick man’s body. 

His sleep was fitful, broken by the world’s unrest. The elder dragons turned on each other until only two remained, one assuming primacy and one taking to the shadows of the mind. The great tree of the green lady rooted down into the world deeply enough to twine together with eternity. The sphinx claimed the highest spire of the vanquished conquerors and perched with the sun at his back, surveying the growing city below while angels wheeled from aeries set in enemy towers. The mighty demon’s unchained passions shook the city. And the city grew, pushing always, always at the edge of His mind. 

The Kalar Gruul heard the sounds of the city, the noise of thoughts beyond counting, the smells of metal and magecraft and masses, the sight of lines and corners and geometry on the horizon. Curious and uncertain, they left in twos and threes and dozens to investigate the great labyrinths. Many became lost in the crowds and stone, and never returned home. 

Ilharg sensed their loss and woke often, certain there was an enemy attacking His people, a threat to be faced. But always there were only His allies in the great accord that now bound them all. Ilharg rose to search the world, sure of a danger He was unable to find. What He found was city. He traveled to the east, to the place where the sun hatched at the dawn, and found hard paving stones laid over the earth. He traveled to the north and found great cathedrals of industry hewn from the living mountains, belching noxious plumes of smoke. In the south, canyons of masonry squatted over the rivers, choking them with gleaming dams. To the west, the hard shapes of reaching mortals had swallowed the sea. He saw that He had been surrounded by a force far greater than the invaders had ever hoped to be.

He turned to his allies, demanding what had become of their promise, of His claim eternal to the wildlands.

“You still hold the wildlands,” said the crackling dragon, who had taken the awe of fire and storm and enslaved it to his artifice. “They seem sufficient for your needs.”

“The compact was forged to ensure peace,” said the sphinx high above him. “The peace continues. The compact works as it should.” He did not look down.

“Your people bring their wildness here,” the chief of angels told him, with a blazing eye unbecoming an ally. “We have not forgotten your part in building this world--but we will defend ourselves from anyone who threatens what we have built, within or without.”

“They know too much,” the shadow dragon whispered in her hoard of secrets. “The way of knowledge is forward, as a river flows downward. It cannot be otherwise.”

“Innocence has value because it can never be regained,” spoke the demon in his burning halls, where his pleasures were empty mirrors of the feasts and solstice revels of the Kalar Gruul. “But they do not see. The primitive is never enough for them, and so it melts away before the fire.”

“We need not lose the wild places,” counselled the green lady, she who had once been closest to Him. Now, her hands held condolences and her green eyes filled with sorrow. “We need only...compromise.”

And as He traveled, roaming the dwindling pockets of wildness that had once been the entire world, He felt the truth. Things would never be as they once were. As powerful as He was, the flow of time was the one thing not even a god could undo.

Betrayed, Ilharg became restless and wild. And His people followed in His wake. 

Those Kalar Gruul who still held to their ways began to fight the encroachment of the city, but they were already under siege. Their betrayal and frustration turned to anger--and soon their rage outgrew even the divine fury of their god. They were mortal, trapped in a world made only of their meager senses, and they felt the cage closing around them, felt that there was nowhere left to go. Facing this threat, there would be no compromise. There would be no quarter. There would only be an unshakeable line against which no enemy would take a step further, and at that line was death. The city choked them, and they choked it back, burning, crushing, toppling the world. Their hatred consumed everything they had, cremating hope and harmony in the blaze. They could no longer grow. They could no longer adapt. They could no longer find peace. In their rage, they could only burn.

They named Him Ilharg the Raze-Boar now, crowning Him in blood and war. With bristle and hoof and razor-tusk and fire-eye, they swept Him along with them as they tore at the walls of the city. They prayed for fury to set upon the world, and He heard their prayers. But the people forgot that they had once prayed to Him for new life to grow from the ashes of the wildfire. They forgot they had prayed to Him for the serenity to adapt to the world. They forgot they had prayed to Him for the wisdom to treat fairly with each other, to maintain the bonds of culture and kinship. What they forgot soon survived only in the memory of Ilharg, who had been with them from the first. But they no longer asked for His memories, only His ferocity and power and destruction.

The Kalar Gruul raged, and the city knew their strength in madness, and drew back from their territories. But no matter how many walls they toppled, it did not fall. And no matter where they looked, it stood on every horizon. And no matter how they burned, the old world of memory did not return from the embers.

The people changed. Kalar Gruul became only Gruul--and the People of the Boar became only animals. And in their image, Illharg changed with them. There was no future, only the betrayals of the past, blood debt and vengeance. The Great Boar’s heart grew heavy with despair, but in time, even He forgot why.

The Gruul fought to hold their islands of wildlands. Cut off, they raided and pillaged, slaying pieces of the city and taking what they could from the corpse. They lost themselves in rituals of violence whose meaning they no longer knew, drowned in drink to forget they were now scavengers stealing from a greater power, were bound by a half-remembered past and worshipped their bindings and called it freedom. And they feasted now in the name of the Raze-Boar who would bring the city to the ground, who fed on their glorious deaths in the name of a purifying utter destruction that would never come, a return to a past that they no longer even remembered. 

Ilharg no longer knew Himself, though he saw His aspect everywhere, though they called on His name more than ever in desperation masked as pride and power. The Gruul called His strength as they needed it, but had little use or memory now for the rest of Him. 

Ilharg became lost. He wandered into the remains of the wild and sought out the far distant places, travelling the through rain and mist. In time, He found himself in a place of bracken and fen, at the ancient lair of a boar. It was a place no one remembered how to find. He knew that this was where Ogun had become the first prophet, where He had first become the protector to his people, where they had first taken His strength to preserve themselves. Now they had all His strength and nothing else. They were stagnant. Dying. They could not hear Him, and His strength could not protect them. In sorrow for what was forgotten, the Great Boar settled into the ancient lair to sleep. Perhaps He would not awaken. Perhaps He would end where He had begun. Bittersweet, He hoped His rage would live on--it was the last thing His people asked of Him, and it gave them comfort. He hoped it would serve them somehow. It was the last hope He had in dreams now empty of it.

Ilharg did not know how long He slept.

He knew only that He was suddenly not alone. The arrival of another had awakened Him, a journey taken across the Oceans of the Sky to this place. He opened ancient eyes for the first time in an age, and looked down. At His feet He saw a child, one of His children, His Kalar Gruul. The boy was wounded, life bleeding out of him. As in days distant beyond memory, he had found his way to this place, to the feet of his god, seeking only not to die alone. The boy’s prayer stirred Him, and Ilharg remembered. Rising to His feet, He went to the fallen child, dying as his blood ran into the earth. He would not pass alone. The Great Boar would stand at the side of a warrior while his spirit passed, as He once had, to guide him from one life to the next. 

One last time.

Ilharg stood over the boy and looked into his eyes.

He did not see the slow death of decay in the boy’s heart, the sickness that had claimed His people. Instead He saw worlds beyond the Oceans of the Sky. He saw verdant life. He saw beauty. He saw hope. He saw the possibility for something more. None of his children had brought this to Him in their hearts in an endless time, and it came to Him like a flood over dry earth. The Great Boar’s memory awakened to a time when His people were Kalar Gruul, great in their deeds and their wisdom and noble in their ways. His spirit stirred, rose, roared to life, and poured into the boy’s heart as the boy had poured into His. 

The child’s wounds were healed, for he now shared the life of a god--a life he had rekindled in kind. The boy and the boar were one. In the broken memory of the Gruul as they were now, none like this boy existed, but in the ancient memory of a god stood memories of chieftains old, great heralds and shamans guiding their people.

Prophets.

Standing from the mud, the young Gruul climbed atop Ilharg’s rough back. They turned to the lands of the people. Together, through eyes shared, They saw a path ahead that contained not endless war, but a war that could be won, and something once lost that might at long last be reclaimed. A struggle worth undertaking. The final fight was upon Them, god and emissary, the last hope. They would either perish, or They would lead their people through. And so They set out on their journey, though neither knew the way.

**Author's Note:**

> Fun fact: Domri Rade was one of my favorite characters, and I'm genuinely upset that the narrative not only unceremoniously offed him, but also really didn't do much with him and the first place. Django Wexler's Gathering Storm featured him for a single chapter, and that is probably his most impactful appearance. I have the same complaints about the Gruul, who were basically left dangling in the wind of the official lore, and doubly so for Ilharg--who is awesome and absolutely reminds me of Lord Akoto from Princess Mononoke--who is Sir Not Appearing In This Story. So, here is a mythology for him, and the Gruul, and Domri. It's not perfect, but I at least feel confident that it's better than all of the nothing provided by WotC. I hope you enjoy it!


End file.
